Waiting for Perec: Long Book Description for Distributor

The title of Mario Meléndez’s book-length linguistic collage Waiting for Perec pays homage to both Samuel Beckett and Georges Perec, announcing that a world conjured by the book is an absurd space where both fiction and poetry melt into the philosophical and the theological, or perhaps the other way around. The individual poems in the collection are short, tight, polished gems of macabre humor where God wanders dark streets, looking for his son. The dreamscape could easily be the one through which Saint John of the Cross moves during his “Dark Night of the Soul,” or the Paris of Baudelaire’s “Spleen,” or that world just on the other side of Alice’s looking glass.

First published in a bilingual Spanish/Italian edition in 2015, Waiting for Perec is Mario Meléndez’s fourth full-length collection of poems. Katie Farris, poet, translator, and associate professor of creative writing at Princeton, writes, “It is a tightly woven book of visions in which truly only three characters appear: God, Death, and a passive Christ. Then there are the cameos a brilliant and bewildering crowd of artists, poets, actors, characters, and creatures who step in and out of the dance of these three characters, doing imitations of God or tracking him, holding Christ’s bone in his mouth, running ahead of Death on a wooden tricycle, and generally making shenanigans with corpses, being corpses, or digging graves.”

As the Colombian writer Piedad Bonnett, winner of the 2024 Reina Sofia Prize for Iberoamerican Literature, observes, Meléndez’s poetry is “nourished by obsessions.” Indeed, Waiting for Perec is obsessed with death. It is a throughline in all his poetry. Death as God’s lover. Death as our constant companion. Death as that entity we will never fully know until we are fully possessed by it. His principal obsession, then, is one of poetry’s perennial themes. In his third collection of poems, Death’s Days Are Numbered, he came out and stared this obsession down and named it. He also came upon and developed the notion of writing as an art of reassemblage, a mode in which the poet is a bricoleur who obsessively combines and recombines images and words and churns out new visions of the world based on fragments and references culled from the dusty attic-trunk that keeps the bits and bobs high and low.

“In Waiting for Perec,” writes as Anthony Geist, Professor of Spanish at Washington University and celebrated translator of Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Luis Hernández, “every poem begins with “I saw…,” and the objects of that vision range from Death and God to John Lennon and Sinatra, from the Marquis de Sade and Madame Bovary to Cortázar and John Wayne.” Indeed, the cameos, as Farris calls them, include painters (Pablo Picasso, Fernando Botero), musicians (Charlie Parker, The Sex Pistols), novelists (Miguel de Cervantes, Jules Verne), film actors (Buster Keaton, Marilyn Monroe), poets (César Vallejo, Alejandra Pizarnik), fictional characters (Phileas Fogg, the Hound of the Baskervilles), and religious figures (Judas, Mary Magdalene). This incomplete list, which omits Kafka, Heraclitus, Salome, Diego Maradona, and others, shows the range of references used by this book to build an absurd world where fiction and poetry melt into the philosophical and the theological.

Like the work of Fernando Pessoa, who makes an appearance in these poems, Waiting for Perec is written under a heteronym, that of an anonymous urn maker who scribbles down these ecstatic visions. While Geist notes that “ saw…” beings each poem, he further writes, “What is less clear is who saw: the poet or poetic persona, Heraclitus, God, Christ.” This ambiguity is a sort of no space, a utopia, the ashes of a funerary urn.

While the book plays with the absurd and with nonsense, it does so in the utterly serious tradition of Lewis Carroll and Italo Calvino. The title alludes to the Irish author Samuel Beckett, a practitioner of literary nonsense, and the French novelist George Perec, member of the Oulipo group and a lover of word play. Meléndez, like Beckett and Perec, plays with the absurd and like them his world is tinged with melancholy. To quote Farris, again, in this collection, “Death has never seemed so lively; like Blake’s hell, the realm of Waiting for Perec is thriving. Like Christ reading Cortázar, I find myself wanting to read Mario Meléndez, in his own words ‘so as not to cry/ he makes my loneliness disappear/ as if by magic’.”

True to the title, neither Beckett nor Perec make an appearance in the book. Instead, as readers wait for them appear among the cast of characters, a toy-obsessed God spends his days, when not taken up with romancing Death, searching for the lost and absent body of his son. As Geist notes, this waiting “the point. Life occurs, is seen, while waiting, in the interim. That space, the intersection of living and seeing, of waiting and doing, is the space of poetry.”

Though visionary and vatic, in the sense of William Blake’s prophetic books or Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, the language is simple and aphoristic. It’s reminiscent of Antonio Porchia’s Voces; that is, it is a pared down language influenced by the modernist turn toward Zen poetry and the directness of an autodidact. Meléndez, though, possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry. One could call, perhaps, the Porchian language Meléndez uses the adoption of something like an international style. And one can trace a lineage that connects him to the likes of Mark Strand, Edmund Jabès, W.S. Merwin, the Neruda of Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair, and the Vallejo of Poemas Humanos. And yet, the world created by these poems seems as baroque as the world of José Lezama Lima.

To quote Farris one more time, “The book itself is full of marvels, but for its translation into English, we have Jeremy Paden to thank. What Paden has accomplished is simply this nearly impossible thing: the delivery of a world that feels as real and timeless in English as stones: ‘I saw God kissing Death/ in a Parisian café/ His beard was centuries-long.’ This translation is a work of art as surely as is its creation.”